If your host machine has a physical solid-state drive (SSD), the host informs guest operating systems they are running on an SSD.

This allows the guest operating systems to optimize behavior. How the virtual machines recognize SSD and use this information depends on the guest operating system and the disk type of the virtual disk (SCSI, SATA, or IDE).

  • On Windows 8, Windows 10, Ubuntu, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines, all drive types can report their virtual disks as SSD drives.

  • On Windows 7 virtual machines, only IDE and SATA virtual disks can report their virtual disks as SSD. SCSI virtual disks only report as SSD when used as a system drive in a virtual machine, or as a mechanical drive when used as a data drive inside a virtual machine.

  • On Mac virtual machines, only SATA virtual disks are reported as SSD. IDE and SCSI virtual disks are reported as mechanical drives.

Use the virtual machine operating system to verify your virtual machine is using SSD as its virtual disk.